Peter and I will be talking about the making of our books – The Shops and Medical Daydreams – tonight at the Wellington Photobook Club. The event starts at 6.30pm at Photospace in Courtney Place. All welcome.

Like this:

The sample proofs for Peter Black and Steve Braunias’s The Shops found their way from China to our house. Happily the reproduction looks excellent. There’s also a wonderful personal essay by Steve that reminds me of some of my favorite long Robert Hass poems.

I love the feeling of an abundance that sets of proofs give – all those images before you and the unbeliveablity (is that a word?) that these sheets of paper will fly up and become a book.

Front and back covers for ‘The Shops’. A special shout out to Katrina Duncan for the great design.

The Shops, the book that Peter Black is doing with Steve Braunias of Luncheon Sausage Press just went off to China for proofing and printing. The work features 44 of Peter’s colour photographs of shops and a great personal memoir/essay from Steve. This hardback book will be a cracker – just in time for Christmas.

Greytown – one of my favourite images from The Shops.

And back today from binding in Petone, was Peter’s beautiful handmade orange book of original prints, Blessed. The work features people crossing the intersection of Queen and Wellesley Streets in Auckland, in the operatic evening light. As well as being an interesting conceptual piece, it throws light on the demographics of Auckland via the main street.

I was stoked recently to have my work featured on the BNZ Heritage Art Collection site (right under Megan Jeninkson and above Colin McCahon!). The three images are from my Urban Landscapes series of the 1980s and were brought for the Collection by the late Peter McLeavey. At the time I’d been excited by seeing books like Uncommon Places by Stephen Shore and American Prospects by Joel Sternfeld, and wanted to apply this sophisticated, nuanced approach to photographing the everyday environment in my own work.

The nice people at the BNZ were concerned to have good reproductions of the work for their website, which gave me an opportunity to have some quality scans done. It was great to reprise some old favourites like this image from Featherston. I’ve also printed contemporary archival inkjet prints of the three images, which are on show at Photospace Gallery in Courtney Place. If you are in Wellington do call in and check them out.